Zissel Aronow

About

I’m Zissel, a community organiser and artist from Philadelphia. My practice has focused on movement in movements — embodiment in community organising spaces. During my time at the RCA, I’ve been experimenting using slow, tactile, and repetitive processes such as archival research, field recordings and interviews, poetry and letterpress printing, sound and reel-to-reel audio tape.

My project started with looking at the ‘hora’, a celebratory Jewish circle dance, once used as a political tool to garner support for Zionism/Israel. As a queer and trans anti-Zionist Jew, I am constantly re-finding and re-imagining Jewishness. In March 2024, I compiled and printed the Jewish Bloc for Palestine Anti-Zionist Shabbos Siddur. This ritual object has since been sent to and used around the world — at encampments and protests and in people’s homes. I want my work to be of service to community and I am interested in creating objects and practices that can be used for revolutionary organising and collective ritual. 

My work has become a study of radical pedagogies that intentionally centre the body/bodies in space, together. My time in RCA’s Visual Communication programme has culminated in a new series called Movement: An Experiment in (Radical) Improvisation, a space of dialogue and interpretation of text- and audio-based works into music. The first two sessions used recordings from calls with dear friends (Dont Rhine and Yema Rosado) and letterpressed poems about the relationship between the body and collective political consciousness as the experiment’s starting point. For each session, a different group of musicians joined the conversation and transformed what we discussed into live improvised pieces. Session One: Khabat Abas (cello), Pat Thomas (piano). Session Two: Anna Lowenstein (fiddle), Saied Silbak (oud), Simon Roth (drums).

I’m looking forward to continuing this work as the recipient of the Studio 459 Residency / RCA SoC Fellowship (2024/25).

Contact: zissel.aronow@gmail.com